Translation and transition: The third conversation on play as humanistic inquiry

LUDICS

SPEAKERS: Yiorgos Anagnostou (Ohio State University), and Nicole Nolette (University of Waterloo)

MODERATOR: Vassiliki Rapti, Emerson College

Translation is a form of play. Meaning is fluid and unstable as it transgresses one language and moves to another. The conversation will be an exploration of bilingualism, of transition, of passing from one to another, of being in play. The speakers will reflect on what it means to center play in the work of translation, how that might transform interpretation and what its political implications/challenges/solutions might be.

Yiorgos Anagnostou is Professor of transnational and diaspora modern Greek studies at Ohio State University. His work is interdisciplinary and has been published in a wide range of scholarly journals (see, http://www.mgsa.org/faculty/anagnost.html). He is the author of Contours of White Ethnicity: Popular Ethnography and the Making of Usable Pasts in Greek America (Ohio University Press, 2009), now under translation into Greek (εκδόσεις Νήσος, 2017). He has also published two poetry collections, Διασπορικές Διαδρομές (Απόπειρα 2012, http://apopeirates.blogspot.com/2012/04/blog-post_20.html), and Γλώσσες Χ Επαφής, Επιστολές εξ Αμερικής (Ενδυμίων 2016, http://endymionpublic.blogspot.com/). He is the co-editor of the upcoming online Ergon: Greek/American Arts and Letters (Autumn 2017). He writes for Greek and Greek American media, and occasionally blogs on Greek America (http://immigrations-ethnicities-racial.blogspot.com/), and diaspora poetry (http://diasporic-skopia.blogspot.com/). His poetry in English has been published in Transnational Literature and Voices of Hellenism.

Nicole Nolette is Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo. Prior to this position she held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and started her career at Acadia University. She is the Canada Research Chair in Minority Studies (Tier 2) and a specialist of theatre produced by Canada’s francophone communities. She works on multilingual Canadian theatre, translation history, the circulation of minority arts, as well as the use and representation of technologies of communication by francophone theatre artists. As the principal investigator of a SSHRC-funded project on material processes of theatre translation between French and English in Toronto, she examines the transition between drama translation and the contemporary production of surtitles for the stage. She is also the president of the Société québécoise d’études théâtrales, a Québec-based association dedicated to the study of performance and theatre.